Big East leading the way in diversity hiring in men's basketball

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Kyle Neptune had heard it for years.

Rumors were swirling that Villanova coach Jay Wright would be stepping down, which not only came from outside pundits but from Wright’s mouth.

In eight years as one of his assistants, Neptune dismissed it every time the two-time National Coach of the Year would broach the subject, as Wright often said he didn’t see himself coaching into his 70s.

"No one ever believed him. I know I didn’t," said Neptune, who spent last season coaching at Fordham. "He usually talked about leaving when he was upset, in a bit of a rage. I thought he will go to the shore in the offseason, he will come back rested and he will be fine."

As everyone knows now, Wright did step down and Neptune was tapped as his replacement. It's an example of how the Big East gets diverse hiring practices right, and the rest of college basketball gets it wrong.

Three weeks earlier, Shaheen Holloway, who guided tiny St. Peter’s to a surprise run in the NCAA Tournament in becoming the first No. 15 seed to reach the Elite Eight, went back home to Seton Hall, where he played and was an assistant under Kevin Willard for eight seasons.

With the hirings of Neptune, 37, and Holloway, 45, the Big East has arguably set the national standard of recognizing minority talent. 

Of the 11 head men’s basketball coaches in the Big East Conference, seven are Black. Providence’s Ed Cooley, DePaul's Tony Stubblefield, Marquette’s Shaka Smart, Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, and St. John's' Mike Anderson are the others.

But that is a far cry from the national average.

Fifty-two percent of the Division I men’s basketball players are Black with each of the 68 teams that qualified for the 2022 NCAA tournament having Black student-athletes on the roster.

But only 24 percent of the head coaches and 22 percent of assistants are black, according to the 2021 Racial and Gender Report Card published in April by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics (TIDES) in Sport at the University of Central Florida, which highlights hiring and racial makeup trends in college and professional sports. (The number was closer to 31 percent of head coaches at the beginning of the 2021-22 season).

"Disgusted." "Fed up." "Unacceptable." "Bull****" where some of the words used by several Big East coaches when asked about the lack of minority coaching around the nation.

"So many people are afraid to talk about race. I’m not at all," said Cooley, the second longest tenured coach in the Big East. "Because it’s being open, honest and direct and if you don’t talk about it and you don’t bring it to the light, nothing is going to change."

While the Big East is leading the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) charge in hiring, other conferences are falling behind. The Big Ten Conference has four minority head coaches in men’s college basketball. The Big 12 has two. The Pac-12 has none.  

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The Big East strives to use its platform to highlight gender and race inequalities. 

Commissioner Val Ackerman said she has lived through equity gaps – but through the lens as a white woman – and is counting on her coaches guiding her to make sure that the equity programs work and there won't be a drop-off in the candidate pool.

"My sense is that when it comes to equity, diversity and inclusion, that all leagues can do it right,” Ackerman told Paste BN Sports. "I hope all leagues care about this as much as we do.

"We have very white schools in the Big East, we have very white teams in the Big East, but when it comes to make up of our basketball teams, representation on the sidelines is clearly a very important step. I think what we saw this past year with our schools was frankly hiring the best people for these jobs who just happen to be very capable black men."  

Thompson’s legacy and need for change

When John Thompson became the first Black coach to win an NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1984 when Georgetown beat Houston, he not only broke barriers but used his status and platform as an advocate for black men receiving high profile jobs.

The climb has been slow and steady. Thompson, who died in 2020, fought against educational discrimination such as Proposition 42, which mandated that aid and scholarships be withheld from freshmen who didn’t meet the NCAA’s standards for eligibility.

"I might have been the first black person who was provided with an opportunity to compete for this prize, that you have discriminated against thousands of my ancestors to deny them this opportunity," Thompson once told ESPN. "So, I felt obligated to define that, and I got a little criticism for saying it."

But criticism didn’t bother Thompson, as moving away from racial stereotypes, graduating his players and seeing his contemporaries succeed was equally important.

Thompson set the standard that all those who followed set out to achieve. However, only three black men, Arkansas’ Nolan Richardson, Kentucky's Tubby Smith and  Connecticut's Kevin Ollie have won championships in the four decades since Thompson’s historic triumph. 

"Coach Thompson’s legacy in our league looms very large," Ackerman said. "It’s often discussed internally. We talked about Big John and what he did and what he meant not only to the Big East but to college basketball and our society. I just hope today’s coaches in the Big East find their voices, just like he did."

Ewing, who played for Thompson and led the Hoyas to three Final Fours and that 1984 championship, said the influence and advice his mentor provided was invaluable to him. He hopes seeing the strides the conference is making will filter down to the rest of college basketball.

"It’s something that Coach Thompson had been fighting for most of his life," Ewing said. "It’s great that I am in a league that is supporting that initiative. We have done a good job about giving guys opportunity. You have schools with a large population of African-American people on their team, and he and I believed that you need to give us an opportunity to coach these kids."

One of the programs to further the advocacy push is BE the Change, the conference’s strategic platform in education and engagement of DEI.

BE the Change, launched in July 2020 just weeks after George Floyd's murder ignited a national conversation on race relations, works with the Black Fives Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to "preserve and honor the pre-NBA history of African Americans in basketball." Stu Jackson, the Big East’s Executive Associate Commissioner, Men's Basketball, said "the message is loud and clear" that the inequality in all areas, not just in coaching, must stop.

A working group roster of university staff and athletic department employees from each conference school along with a student-athlete advisory committee helped facilitate reviewing of policies and practices to make sure DEI is not just a talking point, but something that is sustainable for years to come. 

"We have over seventy percent of our players (in the Big East) that are African-American or international. It’s a real credit, they have made the decision with respect to our head coaches to provide them to guide these young men and players in our league," said Jackson, who spent 13 years as an NBA executive and also was a head basketball coach on a collegiate and professional level.

"What you see is those opportunities not being offered and that’s unfortunate. For the Big East, opportunity makes sense primarily because the demographics of the student-athletes in men’s and women’s basketball and the fact that we are in large urban centers. But that shouldn’t be the only criteria as it relates to nationally."

Does the college game need a Rooney Rule?

In terms of creating a pipeline where there are more chances in coaching, not just for minorities, but for women coaching men’s basketball teams, the answers to the question of how are not so simple.

The Big East did discuss implementing a policy such as the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which mandates that teams interview minority candidates for open coaching and executive positions.

One problem: having every institution agree on policy language and enforcement.

The Rooney Rule, now nearly two decades old, has proponents and detractors, such as former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, who filed a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit, alleging the hiring practices of the league’s teams are no more than a sham. 

Ackerman says her league is in the beginning stages of creating a database with names and possible candidates for future openings that institutions can use.

The idea is that the minority assistants in the Big East will have an opportunity across the nation when positions open. That is certainly good news for the 17 men of color who currently are assistants at each of the 11 conference institutions. 

"The bottom line is all the other schools and the other conferences have to do their part in terms of opportunities too and not just as an assistant," Ewing added.

Holloway says the way to the top of the coaching profession is about self-promotion with the quality of work and not necessarily with your words.

Holloway was a point guard at Seton Hall from 1996-2000 and toiled through several overseas leagues before starting his coaching career by landing at Iona as an assistant in 2007 under Willard.

He has some advice for those young coaches seeking opportunity: Don’t pigeonhole yourself into being good at one thing.

"When you are an assistant coach, align yourself with a coach that believes in you and what you do. Don’t be in a box," Holloway said. "Don’t go somewhere and make a coach or university think you are just there to be a recruiter or whatever. Learn every aspect of the job and having your head coach be an advocate for you."

Cooley bemoans directives such as the Rooney Rule, where rogue interview tactics and rubber stamping to avoid consequences have shed light and diminished credibility on the whole issue. He says that creating a pipeline starts with a mindset: don't have rules mandating anything.

"If you are going to give me a token interview, I am going to keep it moving," Cooley said. "Why do you have to have a rule in place to do the right thing?"

"Are the opportunities in place? There’s a lot of barriers you have to overcome and I am not saying it’s right, but to put rules in place with hiring practices in respect to equity, I appreciate it. I am just saying, 'Why?' "

Where are all the women?

Another part of the equation centering around equality is the lack of females within the male coaching ranks. Professional basketball is closer to seeing a woman hired as a head coach than in the collegiate ranks.

Among the NBA’s 30 teams, six women are assistant coaches. In college basketball, among the nearly 1,500 full-time basketball coaching positions in 362 Division I men's programs, there are none, and there were only eight in all three divisions during the 2020-21 season.

"It’s one of the great mysteries to me why we don’t have more females coaching men’s basketball. I don’t understand how we have gotten to this point without it," Ackerman said. "I hope there will be a course correction around that at some point. Women could add enormous value to any men’s staff."

Dr. Nicole LaVoi, Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, is more terse in her assessment of why women are not patrolling the sidelines and coaching men but adds it has nothing to do with what they look like.

LaVoi has been studying the issue and has published the Women Coaches Research Series & Report Card for the past decade and says women have less than a a quarter of the career breaks than what men have.

"It’s real simple. The male head coaches have to hire women. They have to give women the opportunity, period," LaVoi said. "Head coaches have 100 percent control over who is on their staff. The only reason that we do not have women coaching men’s collegiate Division I basketball is opportunity. There are talented women, qualified women and women that are waiting in the wings and are ready. If they can coach in the NBA, they can coach in college."

Follow Scooby Axson on Twitter @ScoobAxson